I was traveling in the past weeks, after coming back, the first thing I noticed after logging in Gmail web (the Google Apps version) is the opportunity to switch to the new Gmail look before Google forces all of us to do that.

Some of the UI design of the new look seems to be more modern, however, I don’t like the new look, the main problem is the readability. The new look feels too “flat“, there is not clear UI elements (for example, borders) to make the different parts distinguish from each other, for example, when in the conversation view, clearer border lines should be added among the labels list on the left, the email messages on the middle, and the contacts info on the right.

Maybe Google should give us the option continuing using the old look of Gmail, instead of forcing us to do something we don’t like?

To do that, the first step is to enable IMAP access for your chats (this was not possible not long ago), illustrated in the following screenshot.

Then, in the backup settings window in Gmail Keeper, you must set ‘Chats‘ is a ‘Label’ when being asked, as shown in the following screenshot.

And the backed up gmail chats will be stored in eml format just like the ordinary emails. Check the screenshot below to have a look how the chat logs look like in the free Thunderbird email client program.